Review: 'World Trade Center'

BY GENE SEYMOUR | Newsday Staff Writer

August 4, 2006

How many people do you suppose expected "World Trade Center" to come across as a shrill screed? There seem to be great waves of folks throughout this great nation who see red (in more ways than one) whenever the name Oliver Stone catches their collective eye. To read some of the more hysterical blogs greeting the news that Stone was directing a movie about the September 2001 terrorist attacks on America was to find more conspiracy theorizing than even Stone bothered to indulge in in "JFK."

As you may have already heard by now, "World Trade Center" is in no way a screed. Which isn't to say that it lacks Stone's declamatory energy or his near-operatic facility with narrative oomph. Still, it may well be that only a subject that still stings the heart and unsettles the nerves as intensely as 9/11 can enclose and filter Stone's grandiose impulses to such generally positive effect.

"World Trade Center" stirs raw emotions, summons involuntary tears and works over your viscera with what can best be characterized as a bruising delicacy. Unlike "United 93," whose emotional impact was contained by its unruffled efforts to plausibly reconstruct speculative events, Stone's film seeks to stoke the embers of the audience's collective grief while re-awakening the spirit of boundary-breaching, can-do solidarity that trailed the 9/11 attacks. (It could also re-awaken collective fear and rage. Anything is possible with a story such as this.)

To achieve his best intentions, Stone, working from a script by Andrea Berloff, focuses on two real-life New York Port Authority policemen, John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage) and Will Jimeno (Michael Peña from "Crash"). He follows them from the very start of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 as they leave their suburban homes for work on what seems in every way a normal late-summer day.

The movie's gradual build-up from the mundane to the unimaginable contains some of Stone's most evocative and searing filmmaking. The easygoing banter among Jimeno and his fellow officers is juxtaposed against the tense reserve of Sgt. McLoughlin -- who, we'll soon find out, doesn't smile easily. Stone nicely replicates the on-the-ground confusion after the initial attack; how the second plane's collision was considered a rumor even by the rescue workers trying to evacuate Tower One. When that building starts to shudder violently and ominously while McLoughlin and his team are on its ground floor, the dread and incredulity on each man's face seeps into your own gut.

When McLoughlin and Jimeno are seen next, they're trapped beneath layers of ash and rubble. The scenes of random bursts of fire coming at the trapped men are reminiscent of the more harrowing combat scenes in "Platoon." Yet for all the virtuosity, there's no getting around the fact that from this point on, "World Trade Center" is struggling to dramatize helplessness.

Stone's use of intimate detail, especially in the scenes involving the families of both McLoughlin and Jimeno, is the only thing that keeps ongoing frenzy and worry from bogging down the movie. That, and the odd-but-true subplot involving an ex-Marine named Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) who without authorization but with his old uniform joins the search for survivors. Karnes is depicted as the kind of gung-ho guy that would have had much in common with "Platoon's" war-mongering Sgt. Barnes. Yet he's also the trapped officers' last best hope.

Such are the unexpected graces of Stone's movie. Come to think of it, how often does the word, "grace" come up in a discussion of any Oliver Stone's movie?